Calculated surprise and torn-down slabs. An introduction to the art-science project Installing Seismic Risk of Istanbul. Supported by the German Research Centre for Geoscience GFZ Potsdam and presented at the Forecast Forum, HKW 2015.

As we are living in the age of construction on our planet, earthquakes will in the future have an increasing impact on poorly constructed Megacities. Those Megacities at risk represent not only a local extreme risk of lives. Instead these future disasters can have a global changing impact on politics and societies as seen in the case of Fukushima.

There is this unpredictable moment when the underground faults start to rupture. Between the start of the cracking of the Earth and the arrival of the waves that tear through underground, until they shake everything at the surface, there is a tiny, special moment of time. Less than a Chronos [1], yet an instant that could be enriched and transformed through a knowledge beyond primal cognition and experience. A knowledge that could help you save your life, whoever you are, and wherever you might be …

Apart from very few examples like dangerous dares connected to alcohol, little thefts etc “youth” nowadays does not seem really hazardous or risky to mid-European societies. There are discussions about young people spending hours and hours with their mobile-phones or playing computer-games over several days, but only a few would consider this as a threat to society.

The Institute

The Institute for Uncertain Knowledge IUK Berlin is a non-profit undertaking that approaches the phenomenon of “Uncertain Knowledge“ in science and society from an artistic angle, and produces knowledge about uncertainty.

In this framework the artist Svenja Schüffler simultanously creates and contests new practices and aesthetics of alarming, preventing or preserving, as artistic concepts (and thought experiments), installations and drawing projects. Such as on earthquake risk, collective future forecasting, early warning systems or risk management. To analyze and exchange global threats and risks in new ways.

Together with a group of authors from different scientific disciplines such as Anne Schreiber and Gregor Kanitz, IUK also publishes essays and realises lectures and performances on the uncertainy of knowledge.